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Frank Ninkovich . Global Dawn: The Cultural Foundation of American Internationalism, 1865-1890. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. ix + 428 pp. Notes and index. $49.95.

In Global Dawn, Frank Ninkovich, a distinguished chronicler of American liberal internationalism, goes searching for the cultural roots of that phenomenon in the late nineteenth century. He finds what he is looking for, but struggles—not altogether successfully—to align those findings with his own preconceptions.

A diplomatic historian who teaches at St. John's University, Ninkovich professes dismay at the low standing that culture enjoys in his field, railing against the reactionaries who disparage culture as "unworthy of toleration" and an affront to "intellectual respectability" (p. 5). He intends through Global Dawn to redress that failing, making "a case for culture as an essential element of historical explanation" (p. 5).

Those already reaching for their sidearm will insist on knowing exactly what Ninkovich means by culture. He deftly sidesteps the question. "I wonder whether [culture] exists at all," he writes in his introduction, "except as a term that stands for ensembles of behaviors" (p. 1). Still, even if he can't define culture, he knows it when he sees it.

For Ninkovich, the behaviors that count appear in print. More specifically, the chief repository of Gilded Age culture is to be found in middle-brow American magazines. Culture—above all liberal culture—consists of whatever happened to find its way into the pages of The Nation, Harper's Monthly, North American Review, The Century, and similar publications.

These magazines qualify as liberal not because they espouse a set of common principles, but because they express a sophisticated, cosmopolitan sensibility. The rubes were reading the Sears catalog or populist rags devoted to denouncing plutocrats and promoting the cause of Free Silver. "The educated middle and upper classes—whose ideas as writers and readers are the focus of the book"—were dipping into The Atlantic Monthly or Scribner's (p. 2). Liberal, for Ninkovich, serves largely as a synonym for enlightened. Liberal internationalism is enlightenment carried across the seas. [End Page 101]

According to Global Dawn, the people who wrote for, edited, and read these magazines "displayed an extraordinary degree of intellectual curiosity about trends in the world at large" (p. 15). What makes this finding so remarkable, according to Ninkovich, is that this curiosity among elites coincided with the high-water mark of American political isolationism. While the great body of Americans were looking inward, educated liberals were peering outward.

What these elites saw was this: in the latter part of the nineteenth century, technology was causing the world to shrink and history to speed up, creating in embryonic form a universal civilization that "was the functional equivalent of what, more than a century later, would come to be called globalization" (p. 18). American liberals wanted to enlist the United States in the cause of advancing this universal civilization. Their efforts to do so yielded a "rich body of internationalist thought" that, according to Ninkovich, "prefigured the globalist thinking of the twentieth century" (p. 4).

Global Dawn is a brief assembled to demonstrate this proposition. "My primary concern," the author writes "is to show that the cultural soil of the Gilded Age was favorable to the growth of internationalism" (p. 7). Evidence supporting that purpose qualifies for inclusion in the book; evidence that does not falls by the wayside. Ninkovich is refreshingly candid on this point: "giving free rein to my internationalist hunch—prejudice, if you will—meant that I . . . excluded much information that another writer would eagerly have incorporated" (p. 13).

He is candid as well in acknowledging the difficulty of demonstrating an explicit causal connection between late-nineteenth century journalistic scribblings and actual twentieth century events. But here too Ninkovich freely indulges his internationalist hunch. "We can assume," he writes, perhaps a bit breezily, "that they had something to do with what followed them. I would think they had a great deal of influence, for in the absence of this body of opinion, it is hard to see how twentieth-century internationalism could have emerged much less flourish" (p. 7, emphasis in the original). For Ninkovich...

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